World Water Day 2013: The Biggest Story of Our Lifetime is Water

Skoll World Forum
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Flying above the Southeast Australia in a small Cessna, I could see a small puddle of blue in the distance. After we landed, the farmer we met grumbled that he had to drill his well deeper each year so he could grow more rice in the dry lands.

We also found people like Beryl Carmichael, an Aboriginal elder.

Sitting out under the stars eating stewed kangaroo, she told us how, for thousands of years, her people had survived the parched outback.

She told us about Dreamtime, her connection to water, and her role in passing the spirits from one generation to the next. But gone with the desiccated rivers was her link to Dreamtime and her ancestors,. Lost, she feared, forever. An ancient cultural tapestry unraveled.

Two years ago, we began working with the Wilson Center to peel back the complicated layers of China’s water and energy challenge. We found that this competition is perhaps the greatest — yet mostly unseen — threat to the country’s GDP.

In the frozen December, and while our other teams had fanned out across the country, I was dispatched to Inner Mongolia, home to some of China’s largest coal mines.

Flying into Xilinhot, I could see a tiny farm, a speck of a house off in the distance. The lone taxi at the airport took me there, past the mines and across the frozen grasslands.

That’s when I met Wu Yun. A shepherd’s daughter, she had grown up on the lush, green grasslands.

But I learned that the mines are changing her life. Dramatically.

Her family’s well was dry and they had to coax an old tractor 15 km to get water for the sheep and horses. The extended drought had hit hard… and the mines are draining what's left.

It's simple math for the world’s fastest growing economy. In China, there just isn't enough water to mine its coal and meet the growing power demands.

It’s a simple fact of geography and supply: China is dry in the north where the coal is, and the water is in the south.

China is responding to its water problems in only ways a determined nation can. It’s doing everything at once.

China is building a $66-billion canal and pipeline system to bring water from the south to the north.

It is off-shoring its water footprint by investing in coal fields in Australia and food production in Africa.

China is building dams along its major and minor rivers to reduce reliance on coal. But in some cases, it’s building coal plants near the dams as backup. Just in case the rivers run dry.

Can they respond fast enough? In September, we were in Urumqi, China, near the Kazakhstan border. It's incredibly dry. Yet giant industrial bases of massive scale are under construction. They will need water for their mills, their power plants and their nearby cotton fields. But the water supply comes from shrinking glaciers, and scientists aren't sure there will be enough water to last into the next few years.

These are decisions worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Decisions that will affect markets, food supplies, energy production, and lives around the world from a distant corner of China. Big decisions that have big consequences.

But what happens when you bring water to a community that never had it?

To find out, I spent the night in Cuatro, a shanty town in Manila. At about 4 a.m., I heard something I hadn’t expected.